Children are growing up in a world continuously besieged by visual stimuli coming from devices such as television, videos and more recently, laptops, cameras, smartphones and a plethora of touchscreen devices. Although this exposure is marred by complaints from parents and adults in general, the fact is that adoption of video technologies is becoming a necessary teaching methodology to raise academic standards of students. In India too, where the utilisation of technology to improve the existing methodologies in the education ecosystem is still minimal, the academic community is realising the value of IT to explain complex concepts to their students.
The need of the hour, according to industry observers, is to supplement traditional methods of learning in classrooms with innovative IT and multimedia applications to enhance the educational experience. To deal with the challenges of rural education, the government has taken several initiatives?Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, community participation scheme, mid day meal scheme to name a few. According to Sandeep Raina, senior vice-president, North, Cisco?India and Saarc, one of the tools, widely being used to cater to the learning needs of the rural community is e-education, since 70% of the population lives in rural areas, whereas 80% of the teachers are based in urban cities.
?E-education is among the new applications that can be enabled via the internet. Though the concept has existed for a while, it is now gaining prominence with new technological innovations that enable rich multimedia and collaborative experience,? he says.
A case in point is the district learning centre in Chhindwara, Madhya Pradesh, an initiative by Lakhshya Networks and Cisco, which, powered by Cisco technologies reaches out to more than 450 students in the district and makes high-quality education well within their reach, by connecting them with teachers located elsewhere in India. A suite of collaboration and video technologies from Cisco WebEx provide a powerful audio, video and Web-integrated classroom experience.
Apart from improving quality of education in rural areas, video based e-education solutions also help in bringing considerable changes to the higher education scenario in India.
Besides this, institutes can also streamline their internal processes through collaborative solutions. For example, Bapatla Engineering College, an institute in Andhra Pradesh, has deployed a digital multimedia system that virtualises the classroom environment with remote broadcast and viewing of lectures and on-demand materials. The college streams live sessions conducted by visiting professors and subject matter experts to the classrooms as well as simultaneously record and archive the sessions.
Similarly, Microsoft?s flagship project, Partners in Learning, has been actively working towards training teachers and providing a common platform to share the lessons they create using ICT for their own students, making the lessons available to other teachers across the country. In June 2008, Microsoft India announced a renewed commitment to the education sector in India with the launch of its flagship project Partners in Learning 2.0 and an investment of $20 million.